My wife and I have been watching a ton of anime together recently. She’s been going through the streaming options on Crunchyroll and Netflix and finding new series for us to watch, and her recommendations have thus far been spot on, even when they’re weird series about anthropomorphic personifications of subway stations delivering life advice to troubled women.

Yes. That is an actual thing. More about that later maybe.

Anyway, one of the series she’s found for us is Sword Art Online, a series which I’d heard of but had been a little reluctant to try out. Sometimes I will admit that I deliberately avoid popular things, and sometimes – as in this case – I am forced to admit that thing can be popular because they’re actually quite good.

On the other hand, it’s a dangerous series to watch for a guy who’s trying to stay off MMOs, because it really makes me want to find a new one to play. Fortunately, I’ve been able to mostly squelch the urge, because it’s making me want to play something with an anime art style and almost all of those have male character designs that look like they aren’t shaving yet. I’d play an insanely cute girl character instead – there is no shortage of those – but then I’m left with the question of why I’m not just playing more Tera and getting my bunnyzerker on.

Even more fortunately, season TWO of Sword Art Online casts aside the fantasy MMO genre in favor of a fictional online shooting mans game, and having a urge to play one of those is a lot less risky than falling back down the MMO rabbit hole.

What I’m leading up to here is, I decided to try Titanfall, the game that was supposed to be the Killer App for Xbone sales and which kind of failed to set the world on fire. It did have 500 people online tonight, which is plenty to actually get into matches but probably not what EA was hoping for when they sank the development cash into it.

It’s not like me to buy a game that’s exclusively multiplayer, but this was a case where I wasn’t taking a risk in doing so. I was able to download it from Origin to play free for 48 hours, and buying the game proper was only $5.99 on Amazon.

I have had value meals from Carl’s Jr that cost more.

Anyway, I played for a couple of hours tonight and definitely got six bucks worth of fun out of it. I’m obviously still just a bullet sponge for people who actually know how to play, but every match ends with me filling up bars, and sometimes the bars fill completely and make exciting “you filled a bar!” sounds and then they’re empty again but I know that all I need to do is play some more and they will fill again and I will hear the exciting bar filled sound again.

Oh and the shooting mans and robots is fun too, between the bar filling screens.

So, well, if you like filling bars and shooting giant stompy robots and occasionally getting to stomp around in a giant robot yourself, this gives you a lot of that for the money. Recommended. 🙂